9/4/2025 Debra Levey Larson
Written by Debra Levey Larson
Three graduate students in aerospace engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign were recently recognized for their research.
Matteo Guidotti is a Ph.D. student advised by Matthew Clarke.
Guidotti won the Neil Y. Chen Memorial Best Student Paper Award at the AIAA Aviation Forum and ASCEND 2025 held in Las Vegas this summer. His paper is “The Impact of Alternative Fuels on U.S. Domestic Aviation Emissions.”
About the research, Guidotti said, “"Air travel constitutes a non-negligible source of greenhouse gas emissions. This study explores alternative fuels as a means of reducing aviation’s climate impact, using advanced modeling techniques to highlight both the opportunities and challenges of their adoption in the U.S. domestic aviation network.”
Himmat Panag is a Ph.d. student advised by Robyn Woollands.
He received the Breakwell Student Paper Award at the 2025 Astrodynamics Specialist Conference this past month in Boston. The conference is hosted by the American Astronautical Society and cohosted by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Panag’s paper is entitled "Thruster Pointing Constrained Optimal 6-DOF Proximity Operations using Indirect Optimization."
About the research, he said, “Being able to repair, refuel and assemble satellites in space reduces cost, orbit debris and enables a host of future missions. However, during the final approach, the servicing satellite needs to use its thrusters to maneuver near the client satellite. The plumes from these thrusters contain gases which can contaminate sensitive instruments on the client, such as telescope mirrors, cameras and star trackers.”
Panag’s work focusses on finding optimal trajectories for the servicing agent which avoid contaminating the target satellite.
Ph.D. student Bryan Cline is advised by Joshua Rovey and Robyn Woollands. He won the won the AFOSR Student Travel Award at the Astrodynamics Specialist Conference for his paper, "Consistent Modeling of Third-Body Perturbations with Ephemeris Data.”
“My paper focuses on making sure the system dynamics are as close to identical as possible in all reference frames. This is important because when we are solving transfers from the Earth to the Moon, or between other bodies, we may need to change the reference frame to find a solution—for example, change from an Earth-centered frame to a Moon-centered frame,” Cline said. “We want to make sure the dynamics are the same whenever we make that change.
“This paper investigates two methods for modeling the dynamics and compares their consistency and concludes with a discussion about the accuracy of the models. The takeaways are subtle. Which method is better may depend on the application. It is our intention that this paper highlights some of the challenges in modeling the system dynamics both consistently and accurately.”